Remember the ERA?

Remember Prop 8?

Before you are "told" to "oppose" something, perhaps you should first find out what it really is and what's behind the people asking you to oppose it.

https://religiondispatches.org/where-did-white-evangelicalisms-hatred-of-critical-race-theory-really-begin/


In his essay The Rise of Woker-Than-Thou Evangelicalism, conservative pastor and John MacArthur colleague, Phil Johnson laments how some evangelicals are getting on board with “doctrines borrowed from Black Liberation Theology, Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Feminism, and other ideologies that are currently stylish in the left-leaning secular academy.” He argues that in trying to make church “cool,” these leaders “strive for postmodern political correctness” and that “race must be an issue in practically every subject we deal with.” In contrast, he continues, “diversity, tolerance, inclusivity, and a host of other postmodern “virtues” have begun to edge out the actual fruit of the Spirit in the language and conversation of some of our wokest brethren.”

But it was John MacArthur’s repudiation of social justice in the infamous Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel (Dallas Statement) opened the floodgates for critiques on CRT. In Article 1 it reads:

We deny that Christian belief, character, or conduct can be dictated by any other authority, and we deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching. We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for spiritual people other than clear understanding and simple communication of what is revealed in scripture.

At the 2019 gathering of the Southern Baptist Convention, in response to allegations that white evangelicals generally and Southern Baptists particularly were quiet on issues like systemic racism and police brutality, the messengers passed Resolution 9 titled “On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality,” which read, in part:

That critical race theory and intersectionality should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture—not as transcendent ideological frameworks; That Southern Baptists will carefully analyze how the information gleaned from these tools are employed to address social dynamics; and be it further RESOLVED, That Southern Baptist churches and institutions repudiate the misuse of insights gained from critical race theory, intersectionality, and any unbiblical ideologies that can emerge from their use when absolutized as a worldview.

The “denunciation” of CRT and Intersectionality in this statement, however, was too mild for many white evangelicals. For example, John MacArthur, who in the past has offered a theological rationale and support of slavery and enslavers, wrote that the “acceptance of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality was a sign of “liberalism” taking over the SBC and called the approval of the resolution by messengers “a watershed moment” for the decline of the denomination.” Further, he commented, “When you decide to let the culture interpret the Scripture and you need cultural cues to translate the Bible, the horse is out of the barn.”

MacArthur was not alone. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, wrote, “The main consequence of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality is identity politics, and identity politics can only rightly be described as antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have to see identity politics as disastrous for the culture and nothing less than devastating for the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Tom Ascol of Founders Ministries wrote in a blog post, “The reality is that neither Critical Race Theory nor Intersectionality are simply tools. They are indeed ideologies that have arisen out of neo-Marxist, postmodern worldviews and are used by many to promote those worldviews today.”

The continued critique of CRT and Intersectionality led to the formation of the Conservative Baptist Network. According to their purpose statement, they believe in a “just society for all based on biblical truth, opposing racism and sexism in all forms, and therefore rejects worldly ideologies infiltrating the Southern Baptist Convention, including Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and other unbiblical agendas deceptively labeled as “Social Justice.” Therefore, it was no surprise that on September 5, the CBN supported Trump’s Executive Order. The statement read in part:

The Conservative Baptist Network has been clear from the beginning regarding this divisive, anti-gospel ideology. The Network strongly believes in a just society for all based on biblical truth, opposing racism and sexism in all forms, and therefore rejects worldly ideologies infiltrating the Southern Baptist Convention, including Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and other unbiblical agendas deceptively labeled as “Social Justice.” We call upon every Southern Baptist entity to denounce publicly—by statement and action—any and all support for Critical Race Theory.

At the recent 2021 Southern Baptist Convention held in Nashville, many messengers came to the convention to rescind Resolution 9, despite the fact that it was only the faintest nod to the existence of systemic racism and essentially demanded nothing of its members. When they discovered they couldn’t do that because resolutions are nonbinding and merely express the sentiment of messengers assembled that year, messengers tried proposing a new resolution titled “Resolution on the Incompatibility of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality with the Baptist Faith and Message.”

In that resolution, supporters charged that CRT and Intersectionality were “ideologies rooted in Neo-Marxist and postmodern worldviews,” that they “collectively designate people by their social identity groups,” and that the theories “contradict the Baptist Faith and Message” about humanity in general. In closing, the resolution affirmed the statement from the Council of Seminary Presidents that the “affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.”


https://religiondispatches.org/innocent-despite-proven-guilty-beneath-the-rights-anti-wokeness-campaign-is-the-religion-of-america-itself/


What the recent slaps at “critical race theory” from the likes of Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, and the thirty GOP senators who signed an angry complaint letter condemning Biden’s extremely modest proposal for some race-conscious educational grantmaking all have in common is a loathing of the disloyalty they perceive among those who would dare to challenge the approved narrative.
That narrative, going all the way back to Cotton Mather, insists that white men’s colonization of North America and the building of the American empire (continentally and beyond) is and must be the work of Divine Providence. The core American religion holds that any failures or “mistakes” along the way (e.g., the extermination of the indigenous peoples, the enslavement of millions of kidnapped Africans to build the wealth, the subjugation and exploitation of women, the vicious treatment of Asian immigrants, etc.) cannot alter the central fact that ours remains a virtuous history, that we were and are a redeemer nation, a city set on a hill, a beacon of democracy and human rights that still sends its bright beams of hope around the world.

What so infuriates the keepers of the flame is how the witness of Black people, going back to the very beginning, interferes with and ultimately defeats the myth of the Virtuous Republic. This is why anti-Blackness is baked into the increasingly vehement defense of the approved narrative: the one thing the mythmakers cannot tolerate is the persistence of this faithful witness.

The language of the senators’ letter to Education secretary Miguel Cardona shows how Republicans intend to tap into the still-potent religion of American Innocence and its anti-Black subtext:

Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil…Our nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps…

Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart.

The GOP senators go on to fulminate over what they call the “infamous” 1619 Project, created by the New York Times, which was mentioned in the Education Dept.’s announcement of its proposed grantmaking program:

citing this debunked advocacy confirms that your proposed priorities would not focus on critical thinking or accurate history, but on spoon-feeding students a slanted story.

Never mind that the underlying historiography informing the 1619 Project has not been “debunked.” Trump made a big fuss over it, in his usual scurvy fashion, and now it’s accepted gospel among conservatives everywhere that Nikole Hannah-Jones should be hanged by her thumbs for disturbing the peace of the Virtuous Republic.

Here’s a bright red thread—a seething hatred for the likes of Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi—that conservative strategists hope will unite swampland yahoos and oh-so-refined academics and journalists like Sean Wilentz and Ross Douthat. Because they all agree on one thing: there were no actual crimes, white people are not really guilty of anything, and the whiners need to shut up and salute the flag of the redeemer nation.

The big question, of course, is whether the frontal assault on “critical race theory” will have significant political legs. Plenty of liberals seem willing to bet that what we have here is nothing more than white nationalism’s pathetic last gasp: that the demographic tide has finally turned decisively against the racism-drenched reactionary project.


https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

                         


                     Your favorite Brown person,

                                EOD

Since when have Conservatives held “Liberalism dear”?

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Since when have Conservatives held “Liberalism
> dear”?
===============================
Might be referring to neoliberalism -- free markets, deregulation, austerity, starvation wages, Social Darwinism

Free markets, limited state (constitutionalism), individual liberty were the main tenets of the original liberalism. Neither populism nor austerity were part of that more expansive and optimistic vision.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 01:24AM by Lot's Wife.

CRT: Conservatives in search of a Talking Point that will stick to the wall.

A backup is needed in case transphobia doesn’t stick to the wall. Besides, CRT is much easier to type.

GNPE Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> CRT: Conservatives in search of a Talking Point
> that will stick to the wall.

Except it's not just a talking point. It is openly promoted by companies like Coke in workshops and BLM in its press releases.

CRT assumes people cannot change and that no one can make their own choices. It also says every western system is racist, even though most were set up without a thought to it.

Oh, baloney. CRT has been around for decades in academia. Basically nobody said boo about it in the general public until the last year or so. The previous set of hot buttons have grown tepid, so a new list is being test-marketed.

Remember when society was going to collapse if gay couples were allowed to marry? That hot button has gone cold. Now society will collapse if Blacks are included in history, the 1921 Tulsa massacre being a recent case in point. No, society will not collapse. This is just this year’s attempt to create a new hot button. People not getting all worked up over Common Core anymore.

BTW, Civil War history as traditionally told is not so much about black people, as it is about white people fighting about black people. In my opinion the history of Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement from the 1940s through the 1970s did finally start seriously including blacks in history.

As so often, Anyhooever You Are Today, you say something specious and in the process inadvertently point others in the right direction.


Anyhoo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> CRT assumes people cannot change and that no one
> can make their own choices.

False in two ways. First, CRT is an historical focus, correcting errors and omissions in the existing record. It's sort of like, you know, all history. Why are there so many biographies of Winston Churchill? Because subsequent research found problems in the first one. Why are there hundreds of histories of Jordan's experience under various empires? Because the first history was incomplete and in some senses inaccurate. You and your ilk are perfectly happy reading a new account of the life of Mao but for some reason think fixing the shortcomings in racial histories should be verboten. Why is that? What is it about the history of POC that frightens you so much that you must pull the covers over your head and hope that history never gets any better?

Second, as an historical approach CRT assumes--and can assume--nothing. You are attributing volition to a field of study. That's like saying a colonoscopy likes the Beetles. And if we fix your statement by saying "the proponents of CRT assume people cannot change," it still makes no sense for the simple reason that the history and the advocacy of societal change presume that people CAN change. That's the whole point.


---------------
> It also says every
> western system is racist, even though most were
> set up without a thought to it.

This is just as silly as saying CRT assumes people can't change, for here you presume that a system cannot function in ways its founders failed to anticipate. You might as well claim that the burning of fossil fuels could not possibly cause global warming because the inventors of the internal combustion engine acted "without a thought to" climate change. Or that the Israeli constitution could not possibly give disproportionate power to small extremist parties because the writers of the constitution did not realize their system would have that effect. The truth is that systems frequently if not always produce unintended consequences.


-----------------
A good metaphor of racism and racist systems is language. You were born in an Anglo-American country and as a child learned English, eh? You did not make that choice, nor did your parents. It happened naturally. So you grew up with a favoritism towards English and English literature and with an inability to understand intuitively the language and culture of Ecuador. Later in life you may move to that country, learn its languages, and develop a good understanding of it. But you'll still have an accent and there are elements of the culture you'll never fully comprehend.

The same is true of racism. In the first place, the US constitution was set up explicitly to enshrine racism--blacks are only 3/5 of a human, the federal government cannot intervene in states' internal affairs--so your notion that no one intended that effect is wrong.

But if we ignore that fact and look at the individuals who grew up in the United States or Canada or Lithuania, we see that they imbibed the racism of their countries just like language: no one asked them their feelings but they learnt it anyway. The advocates of CRT, or sensitivity training to put it in less inflammatory terms, is to teach people what is effectively a second language, a second and in some ways preferable language. Will their mastery of that language be perfect? In most cases, no. But they can make progress; they can become proficient if not fluent in their second language. In the same way, teaching people how institutions affect different peoples differently can go a long way towards making society better.

So you are fundamentally wrong. CRT assumes that people can change; they can choose to do better. Your statements to the contrary are simply false.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 07:59PM by Lot's Wife.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
----------------------------------. It's sort of like, you know, all
> history. Why are there so many biographies of
> Winston Churchill?

Because they sell really well? Not because most of them have anything new to say.

The English writer Alan Coren did a book called "Golfing for Cats" and had a guy with a swastika on the cover. Someone asked him why he did that and he said he found out golf, Nazis and cats were the three most popular book topics in the UK.

Manacled Mormon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Lot's Wife Wrote:
> ----------------------------------. It's sort of
> like, you know, all
> > history. Why are there so many biographies of
> > Winston Churchill?
>
> Because they sell really well? Not because most of
> them have anything new to say.

That comment indicates that you don't read many biographies of Winston Churchill. Too busy with Nazi cats, perhaps.

"...ours remains a virtuous history, that we were and are a redeemer nation, a city set on a hill, a beacon of democracy and human rights..."

Which is BS they invented to make themselves feel okay, even righteous, about the evil they did and would do.

Their beloved Christianity teaches we are all sinners, but these folks insist they never did anything wrong.

Let's say we got a basketball game going, but the rules say for every basket our team sinks it counts as half a point (per the rule book), while every basket the other team sinks counts as a full point (per the rule book).
So the idea is hey, we gotta fix that book.

That's really all it is.

The complexities are twofold:
1. Trying to explain how the rule book got to be that way in the first place;
2. Trying to explain how to remedy it.
(This is why it is called "theory.")
(A third complexity is confusing theory as immutable fact)

These complexities are what make it seem confusing, allowing some to draft it into a desired culture war.
Well, don't let 'em fool you.

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/07/05/black-farmers-left-out-usda-497876

See, this is kinda what CRT is trying to square.
How d'ja 'splain it? I mean, you know, numbers are numbers . . .

Well here's how I explain it:
A different ethic would heartily approve of this inequality, e.g. Mormons would most certainly.
They've long ago cast their lot.

https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/mormons.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45226775?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Probably still having an impact today.
Wasn't long ago, student pops at BYU got a special invite to SLC and an interview to determine if there be any "blood of Cain" in mom, 'cause -- being of samurai lineage -- she looked different

Purity is a real thing with these who squeak when they walk

As a general rule (I'm NOT a General!) Repubs & their conservative masters view teachers as Democratic voters; they see Democratic voters as opponents / enemies.

opponents ('enemies") are objects of voter suppression efforts, some are even attempting to end mail-in voting here in Washington State were it's a model of accuracy & easy-access.

This extremism is a danger to our representative form of governance / governing, and I don't see a way out of the polarization we're now experiencing. Scary.

>>As a general rule (I'm NOT a General!) Repubs & their conservative masters view teachers as Democratic voters; they see Democratic voters as opponents / enemies.

I'm always amused by the notion conservative politicians seem to carry that conservatives are somehow barred from the teaching profession. They are not.

It'd be nice if lily-white suburbanite liberals listened more to black people about race, like this guy for example:


Robin DiAngelo Is The “Vanilla Ice” Of Anti-Racism: What happens when you weaponise white guilt?

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/robin-diangelo-is-the-vanilla-ice-of-anti-racism-c163a76655f5

Snippet:

Let’s get something straight before we go any further; Robin DiAngelo is a racist.

I don’t mean that in some abstract “racism is the water we’re swimming in" way. Or even in an “all white people are racist" way. I mean it in the good old-fashioned “she believes deep-down that black people are inferior” way.

I’m confident I won’t be hearing from her lawyers for saying this because she confirms it with almost every word that comes out of her mouth.



The author has some good advice:

“The most valuable contribution most people can make is to change their world. To stop treating black people as a field of study and start treating us like ordinary human beings. To realise that there’s not much difference between treating us like animals who can’t think at all, and children who can’t think for ourselves. To teach the young people in their lives (preferably by example) that it’s wrong to judge people by the colour of their skin, whatever colour that skin happens to be.”


You can read more of Steve QJ and support him here:

https://steveqj.substack.com/

I very much agree, deangelo is the definition of racism, I'll go further than that, she's also a proud self aserting hypocrit and a bully (to other white women who have the unfortunate circumstance as to be stuck listening to one if her training sessions, she describes her rise to prominence and how she had to leave the ghetto (where she says the people of color are) and move to the white suburbs, where it's safe, and then she attacks other white woman (never men) when they say something she doesn't like, and the worst of all is that she makes donald trump jokes, I've read her it's awful!

> and the worst of all is that
> she makes donald trump jokes


94.2% of politics is about self-interest, and as such is worthy of all the laughter we can muster.

It's not the comedian's fault that some people exist only to serve as self-caricatures.

I remember it was said that people should be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin.

It is bizarre that supposed left wingers seem determined to do the opposite. In fact they judge entirely on appearance not personal decisions. It's a form of racial profiling.

Anyhoo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I remember it was said that people should be
> judged by the content of their character not the
> color of their skin.

58yrs later, MLK’s Dream of color blindness is considered ‘old fashioned’ since it was never realized and it didn’t bring about anything close to the utopia he dreamed of creating. Now Harvard is having to defend race based Quotas in front of the Supreme Court, due to the fact it uses race to discriminate against Asians, who consistently score higher on standardized tests than any other race. If the SCotUS rules against Harvard, it will result in cutting the number of black and brown students in half and increasing the number of Asians significantly.

Ironically, CRT came out of Harvard Law School decades ago and only recently got picked up by Fox News to use as a weapon in the ongoing racist ‘CULTure War’ against the Left Wingers/academia.

> It is bizarre that supposed left wingers seem
> determined to do the opposite. In fact they judge
> entirely on appearance not personal decisions.
> It's a form of racial profiling.

I agree and I’m an old school ‘Left Winger’ who has not abandoned MLKs dream, just because it hasn’t been realized. There are good reasons we abandoned Affirmative Action, mainly because it discredited black and brown people, who everybody automatically assumed were Affirmative Action hires, even if they were hired because they were the best candidates for the job. That needed to change because it didn’t work. What does work is dealing with facts and reality. Get to the root causes of the reasons black and brown people score considerably lower on standardized tests than whites and Asians. Fix that!
Don’t lower the standards so that anybody can qualify, no matter how badly they failed the test.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 04:30PM by schrodingerscat.

> dealing with facts and reality. Get to the root
> causes of the reasons black and brown people score
> considerably lower on standardized tests than
> whites and Asians. Fix that!

If the United States fixed the underlying problem by basing affirmative action on socioeconomic factors as recommended by your heroes du jour, you and your son would still face what you consider racial discrimination.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If the United States fixed the underlying problem
> by basing affirmative action on socioeconomic
> factors as recommended by your heroes du jour, you
> and your son would still face what you consider
> racial discrimination.

I was discriminated against under affirmative action.
I tried to become a firefighter and got to be 7th on the hiring list of one department, which hired 10 people that year, all black or brown.
If we based everything on merit, like I am a proponent of, then we’d realize MLK’s dream a lot sooner.

Blacks net worth, on average, is 1/10th white net worth, per household.

THAT is what needs to be addressed!

But we’ve got about 7 or 8 ongoing, worsening, crises going on at the same time in America,

#1. Drug Epidemic
#2. Mental Health crisis
#3. Homelessness crisis, see #1&2 above
#4. COVID Pandemic (Now Delta Varient is doubling every week)
#5. Environmental crisis
#6. Illegal alien invasion
#7. Cops shooting unarmed blacks
#8. Growing wealth gap

Not necessarily in that order.
I actually think #5 is our biggest crisis,
115f in June is just the start of the shit storm headed our way.
So which one should we tackle first?

Oh yeah, I left out the fact more than half of Republicans believe violence is an acceptable means of transferring power.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 10:34PM by schrodingerscat.

You are right. Socioeconomic factors are probably a better proxy for disadvantage than race per se.

But what you insist on not understanding is that if society opted to counteract that disadvantage, it would necessarily adopt compensatory measures such as giving preferential treatment to those who were unable to buy access to good neighborhoods and good schools.

And who would suffer from the grant of preferential help to the poor? Rich white people living in nice parts of rich white states. Do you know anyone like that?

Bottom line: since your view of what is appropriate is based solely on your interests, you would reject socioeconomic criteria with as much fervency as you now do racial preferences. And that is why you are not a liberal.

You’re right, I’m not a liberal. I’m a progressive.
I understand that in a socialist country wealth is redistributed through heavy taxation. I’m all for the kind of socialism I have seen working well in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and most of Europe. But America is not a socialist country, unfortunately. So it’s survival of the fittest capitalism at its finest. Let the poor and mentally ill suffer homelessness, as long as I get mine! Fuck Yeah ‘Merica!

Sure. You're a progressive just like Bernie Sanders, who is on record as opposing affirmative action.

Affirmative Action based upon racial quotas were ruled unconstitutional by the SCOTUS.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/12/us/affirmative-action-fast-facts/index.html

So yeah, I do believe in what is constitutional.

Wait--I thought you said you were a progressive yet now you've shifted the terms of the debate and are claiming you are a constitutionalist. They are not the same.

Are you acknowledging that you are not a progressive?

If not; if you continue to claim that you are a progressive, I ask again whether you can name one instance in which Bernie Sanders, your progressive hero, has denounced affirmative action.

Bill Maher doesn't count.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2021 12:54PM by Lot's Wife.

I am independent, who leans progressive, not a constitutionalist. I don’t agree with Sanders on every issue. I have not heard him address Affirmative Action, other than saying,”Yes” when asked if he supports AA.
I don’t, not just because racial quotas are unconstitutional, but because they discriminate against Asians and White people, based solely upon skin color, which is racist and wrong, IMHO.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaay3761

The politics of zero-sum thinking: The relationship between political ideology and the belief that life is a zero-sum game

The tendency to see life as zero-sum exacerbates political conflicts. Six studies (N = 3223) examine the relationship between political ideology and zero-sum thinking: the belief that one party’s gains can only be obtained at the expense of another party’s losses. We find that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so. Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld. Consequently, conservatives view social inequalities—where the status quo is frequently challenged—as zero-sum, but liberals view economic inequalities—where the status quo has remained relatively unchallenged in past decades—as such. Overall, these findings suggest potentially important ideological differences in perceptions of conflict—differences that are likely to have implications for understanding political divides in the United States and the difficulty of reaching bipartisan legislation.



https://www.salon.com/2021/04/08/the-sum-of-us-author-on-what-racism-costs-white-people-and-the-lie-of-a-zero-sum-racial-hierarchy/

This lie of the zero-sum racial hierarchy I identified in the course of my journey to write "The Sum of Us," is our biggest impediment to progress in America today. I wanted to go back to the beginning to figure out where this lie came from. It's something that's not believed by the majority of people of color. We don't think our progress needs to come at white folks' expense. We don't think we're on an opposing team and that there are only so many points you can score on the board, that a dollar more in our pocket means a dollar less in theirs. That's not the way we see the world, and yet that is a dominant white worldview.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2021 01:29PM by anybody.

But to get to the root of the achievement gap is a much more difficult thing for the left to grapple with than to just toss the blame at white male patriarchy. Thomas Sowell has done research in this area, he found that on the 1940s there was an all black high school in dc that routinely did better than the white suburban schools, they had strict standards, routinely expelled troublemakers, demanded kids do well on tests as a result it was great, then integration came, and the leftists didn't like being lorded over by so called black elite,

The civil rights agenda didn't help things much either, with women being able to rely on the gov instead of baby daddy for support, the great society and war on poverty caused more poverty than anticipated

"It's not the comedian's fault that some people exist only to serve as self-caricatures."

--A wise man

Maca not logged in Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The civil rights agenda didn't help things much
> either, with women being able to rely on the gov
> instead of baby daddy for support

Sounds racist and sexist and embodies an unhelpful attitude towards the general debate on the topic.

Ya think?

Yes. I have a talent for stating the obvious.

It's surprising how frequently one encounters a person who doesn't notice the bull moose that is breathing moist and stinking air in his face from six inches away.

Sometimes the obvious must be stated and restated.

Nightingale Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sounds racist and sexist and embodies an unhelpful
> attitude towards the general debate on the topic.

In other words, standard macaRomney drivel.

Thank you, Nightingale, for showing more restraint than I do.

Ha, ookami. I enjoy the way you express yourself.

I see a lot of wrong assumptions here.

As LW said, this would still happen even if you had the totally colour-blind, race-neutral world that Maca et al. are talking about.

Here's a recent example from 2019.

A town in Georgia refused to hire a top candidate for the position of city manager because he was African American.

https://www.newsweek.com/georgia-mayor-atlanta-race-relations-1416577

Systemic racism is just that -- it's baked in to the system. Think about how gerrymandering works. It relies on "redlining" -- the practise of denying housing to non-whites in certain areas. You wouldn't be able to "pick" the type of people who would be potential voters for you if this was not the case. It's not self-segragation, either. That's another myth that people make up to "explain" why they live in the world that they do without wanting to face up to the fact that it was something that their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents did deliberately.

Another example: single-family housing. If you zone an area to be single-family housing only in an area where the median housing price is $300K, you will have very few Latinx and African American households in that area because of the vast income inequality gap. Why is there an inequality gap? How did your great-grandparents make it through the Depression with almost nothing to become middle-class after WW2? No one today explains how they were able to get their first house after the war because of the GI Bill or how a stable job and home helped your grandparents go to university and get their first car and home.

The world you grew up in was purposely and deliberately created to be "white" and systems were put in place to ensure that it would always remain so.

Racism exists because there are people who want it to exist for various emotional and other psychological reasons. Evangelicals made up their own version of christianity to justify their discrimination and so did Joseph Smith when he created Mormonism. The difference is now that they use religion to influence politics to create their own version of reality instead of just trying to justify predjudice.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 07:03PM by anybody.

Racist mythology is also built to purpose. Here's an article explaining that the modern racist interpretations of Roman government and history are wrong. In fact, Rome was far more diverse and egalitarian than the modern West.

That was recognized until the turn of the 20th century, when people in various European and American countries decided to alter the popular understanding to support the notion of racial separation and white superiority. Those mischaracterizations are now the stuff of right-wing and white supremacist myth. Challenge that new "history" and suddenly you are a CRT lunatic or an advocate of "cancel culture."

And all the while it is those "purists" who base their politics on the cancellation of the true sources of Roman power, including the empire's disregard of ethnicity.

https://aeon.co/essays/colonialism-is-built-on-the-rubble-of-a-false-idea-of-ancient-rome?utm_source=pocket-newtab

https://theconversation.com/mary-beard-is-right-roman-britain-was-multi-ethnic-so-why-does-this-upset-people-so-much-82269

Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere,
nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.

I’m not overly anxious, Caesar, to please you,
Or to know whether you’re a white or a black man.

The Roman poet Catullus, now known for the erotic verse he wrote for Lesbia and Juventius, wasn’t particularly bothered about a man’s skin pigmentation (in this particular instance, that of Julius Caesar). So why are we?

Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, has recently been at the receiving end of a “torrent of aggressive insults” for suggesting that Britain under the Roman empire – which at its height stretched from northern Africa to Scotland – was ethnically diverse. The trouble started when Beard described an educational cartoon produced by the BBC, which included a black Roman solider in Britain, as “pretty accurate”.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 07:08PM by anybody.

There are all sorts of documents showing the presence of black and Arab officials and military leaders in the Roman empire and in many of the derivative cultures. Shakespeare did not make that up. Early Christianity and Islam throughout most of its history was likewise largely colorblind.

Modern racism is a function of the Napoleonic Wars and then the eugenics movement, which gave a patina of scientific legitimacy to what was in essence a vulgarity. It's just that in today's political culture the myth of racial purity has achieved religious status and is supposed to be immune to correction. We are thus asked to refrain from cancelling the previous cancellation of what Rome, and many other civilizations, were actually like.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 07:56PM by Lot's Wife.

I really enjoyed reading that article. Wow - who knew!

It sure shows how one's knowledge base is stunted if we retain ideas we were taught at home and/or in school as kids and do no further independent research, or reading at least.

Also, my brain doesn't conjure up all these ideas and queries itself - for the most part (OK, almost all) I have to rely on others with brain power, knowledge and an interest in setting the record straight.

The sentence "Romans didn't consider white to be supreme" really stands out. As well as the (racist) idea behind all the white marble statuary.

It shows how you have to think beyond the obvious. I have always thought the ancients used the white marble because of its beauty or due to their wealth or else thinking that's just how they did things.

Am I doomed to find out in 2021 that every one of my idols, favourite stories and all the history I've ever learned have to be re-thought?

I fear so.

We're going through an upheaval in Canada right now regarding recent tragic discoveries of mass burial sites and unmarked graves of First Nations, Inuit and Metis children. Leaders of the indigenous communities, pulling no punches now, say it's further proof of the murders of many of their children who were forced by the Government of Canada to leave their communities and live at residential schools run by several churches, including Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and United. The children were abused by priests, nuns and other teachers and many lost their lives, for several different reasons, including malnutrition, disease and abuse.

To even try and comprehend how such horrors could occur one must understand the guiding principles of the government and church leaders. Their purpose was to take over Indigenous lands and assimilate the children into "mainstream" Canadian society. Many of the schools, operating from the late 1800s into the 1990s(!), were run under the principle that the children needed to be "christianized" and assimilated and many believed that "Indians" had no souls because their spiritual practices and beliefs didn't conform to Canadian society's ideas, and especially those contained within the dogma of the various churches. This is how they tried to justify the mistreatment of the children and all the deaths that occurred.

The full scope and horror of such ideas and treatment is only now being fully realized outside the Indigenous communities. This type of discovery (children's graves), sadly, isn't new but the full picture is coming into focus for the country now as several discoveries have been made in the past month, in various different locations, at sites of former residential schools and adjacent graveyards. (Some of the children were buried in cemeteries but ended up somehow without grave markers; others (including babies) were buried on the school grounds; still others in unmarked mass graves).

Indigenous leaders say we should brace for more discoveries. Of course, they always knew the reality, but the vast majority of Canadians through the generations did not. The Indigenous leaders are much saddened, but unsurprised by these developments.

Yet again, it's obvious that white people acted like they were supreme masters and inflicted atrocities on Aboriginal Peoples for generations and current generations are still suffering, from that history and its effects as well as due to ongoing racist policies in their schooling, medical and social worlds.

So yeah. That's a history that is yet to be fully uncovered and written.

It's kind of causing shock waves for Canada Day (July 1). A number of communities are cancelling their celebrations. We're left with the question: What are we celebrating? Canada the Good? Uh.....



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2021 09:12PM by Nightingale.

It does ring false to claim that the history that existed a year ago is accurate and must not be "canceled"--meaning revised--now that new and critically important evidence has emerged, doesn't it?

Of course the same applies to the United States and many other countries. What happened to Native Americans and African Americans and Japanese Americans and many other peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere cannot be suppressed simply because the truth discomfits a particular political movement.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture

Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, like most people, he thought of Greek and Roman statues as objects of pure white marble. The gods, heroes, and nymphs displayed in museums look that way, as do neoclassical monuments and statuary, from the Jefferson Memorial to the Caesar perched outside his palace in Las Vegas.

Aphrodisias was home to a thriving cadre of high-end artists until the seventh century A.D., when an earthquake caused it to fall into ruin. In 1961, archeologists began systematically excavating the city, storing thousands of sculptural fragments in depots. When Abbe arrived there, several decades later, he started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public. “Imagine you’ve got an intact lower body of a nude male statue lying there on the depot floor, covered in dust,” Abbe said. “You look at it up close, and you realize the whole thing is covered in bits of gold leaf. Oh, my God! The visual appearance of these things was just totally different from what I’d seen in the standard textbooks—which had only black-and-white plates, in any case.” For Abbe, who is now a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, the idea that the ancients disdained bright color “is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art.” It is, he said, “a lie we all hold dear.”

In the early nineteen-eighties, Vinzenz Brinkmann had a similar epiphany while pursuing a master’s degree in classics and archeology from Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich. As part of an effort to determine what kinds of tool marks could be found on Greek marble sculpture, he devised a special lamp that shines obliquely on an object, highlighting its surface relief. When he began scrutinizing sculptures with the lamp, he told me, he “quite immediately understood” that, while there was little sign of tool marks on the statues, there was significant evidence of polychromy—all-over color. He, too, was taken aback by the knowledge that a fundamental aspect of Greek statuary “had been so excluded” from study. He said, “It started as an obsession for me that has never ended.”

anybody Wrote:
------------------------------------------------------
>
> Another example: single-family housing. If you
> zone an area to be single-family housing only in
> an area where the median housing price is $300K,
> you will have very few Latinx and African American
> households in that area because of the vast income
> inequality gap. Why is there an inequality gap?
> How did your great-grandparents make it through
> the Depression with almost nothing to become
> middle-class after WW2? No one today explains how
> they were able to get their first house after the
> war because of the GI Bill or how a stable job and
> home helped your grandparents go to university and
> get their first car and home.
And those blacks who fought in WWII came home and were refused VA Loans, which all translates into the wealth gap today, between whites and blacks.
So what to do?
Seems to me like we ought to start by forgetting about race.
Make it a non-issue.

> Racism exists because there are people who want it
> to exist for various emotional and other
> psychological reasons. Evangelicals made up their
> own version of christianity to justify their
> discrimination and so did Joseph Smith when he
> created Mormonism. The difference is now that
> they use religion to influence politics to create
> their own version of reality instead of just
> trying to justify predjudice.

The difference is now there are 300million guns in America and guess who owns 90% of them. Evangelicals, white nationalists, the 3%ers and Proud Boys.

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So what to do?
> Seems to me like we ought to start by forgetting
> about race.
> Make it a non-issue.

So we pretend that systemic discrimination doesn't exist--as the United States has done for most of the last two centuries.

What do they call someone who keeps doing the same thing expecting a different outcome?

Any wonder that dinosaur Atlanta Mayor got replaced by a black woman? “I’m a Christian and I believe we don’t do the whole interracial mixing thing.” Lol? Good, GTFOOH!

CRT is a hypothetical construct, it doesn't exist in reality;

no one's seen it, touched it, or had a beer with it.

"Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—which violate the basic principles of equality and justice."

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/critical-race-theory-fight/

Hell, Steve ---
- i LOVE being outraged

azsteve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Americans are naturally outraged that critical
> race theory promotes three ideas—race
> essentialism, collective guilt, and
> neo-segregation—which violate the basic
> principles of equality and justice."

Ah yes, another conservative making assertions about a discipline he does not understand.

1) Race is essential in systems that are designed to oppress one race. Race was the basis of slavery, so too to Jim Crow; race is essential to the way Jews were, and Romani are, treated in Europe; race is why it was until recently impossible that any significant number of non-Japanese could become Japanese citizens. So all that generalization means is that we have to ask if there are systems in the United States that treat different races differently. But then I guess it's easier to avoid that question and go right to the stereotypes.

2) CRT does not depend upon, or advocate, collective guilt. That's just BS that you guys toss around so you don't have to address the empirical question about whether systems of racism exist as they have in the American past

3) Neo-segregation? Quite the opposite. Most people who employ CRT are trying to break down the barriers preventing integration of neighborhoods, board rooms, and country clubs. So this accusation is tripe.

As for the notion that "Americans are naturally outraged" by CRT, such a generalization is absurd given that the purpose of the passage is to denounce the prominence of CRT in the United States. Apparently a lot of Americans are not "naturally" or otherwise "outraged" by CRT.

Hint: when a speaker contradicts himself in his one-sentence adumbration, there's no reason to delve into the details he presents.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2021 07:25PM by Lot's Wife.

You are free to believe whatever you want when it comes to what CRT really is. But the facts are that white people are being sent to training camps (sometimes disguised as "training") by employers, where they are forced to admit their guilt for being white or to admit their "white privilege", in shame. That is outrageous. If Jesus were here working a job, he might also be forced to admit his white privilege. The ironic part of that is is that the real Jesus probably had much darker skin than the pictures of the Mormon Jesus found in Mormon chapels. But still, those who are familiar with these CRT trainings will have to admit that people are forced (testimony meeting style, or in writing), to express shame because they are white. That makes CRT a cult. You can regulate behavior, but not belief.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2021 07:58PM by azsteve.

I have received Affirmative Action training where I work and find nothing wrong with it. Affirmative Action regulates behavior only, and does not require anyone to believe any kind of any ideology other than their obligation to comply with some fair and reasonable anti-descrimination laws. The concepts of collective guilt, racial identity issues, and neo-segregation are not taught nor are they relevant in Affirmative Action. Perbaps Affirmative Action helps to equalize some residual discrimination that exists in the market and it might cause the unfairness pendulum to affect white people unfairly at times also. Affirmative Action (if you understand its proper application), also creates more transparency. It's a good start. If mis-applied, it can lean unfairly against white people. But no system is perfect. In contrast to CRT, Affirmative Action types of actions and laws seem to be the correct approach to addressing the racial/fairness issues.

The government has the right to regulate your behavior, but not your beliefs. Teaching social justice should come from family and churches. As we all know, Mormonism has earned a big "F" when it comes to teaching that everyone of all races should be treated equally and fairly. If you look at recent episodes Mormon stories that just went up in the past few weeks, you'll see five episodes interviewing Luna Lindsey Corbden. When going over thirty signs of cults and high-demand religions that that she covers in her book, a lot the elements of those cult behaviors seem to be taught in Critical Race Theory, especially the parts dealing with dissent as applies to beliefs.

azsteve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When going over
> thirty signs of cults and high-demand religions
> that that she covers in her book, a lot the
> elements of those cult behaviors seem to be taught
> in Critical Race Theory, especially the parts
> dealing with dissent as applies to beliefs.

What definition are you using? I ask because CRT does not have "parts dealing with dissent as applies to beliefs."